OK , So Is Mitt a Christian?

The Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of 

Later Day Saints in Salt Lake City

Is Mitt Romney a Christian?  This question seems to capture the attention of a lot of people right now.  First, let me say that as a Catholic who remembers John Kennedy’s presidential campaign when his Catholic faith was an issue, I support the United State’s Constitution that provides there shall be no religious test for office.  I am interested in a person’s values—very interested—but not their formal religious affiliation.  But that isn’t the point I want to deal with in today’s posting.  I want to look at the question of whether the Mormon faith is a genuine Christian denomination or not.  
     First of all the problem is the word “Christian.”  We use it in very ambiguous ways.  “She is such a Christian” generally means “She is such a good person.”  It particularly refers to people who are kind and generous, as if one had to be a disciple of Jesus to be kind and generous.  I wish all of Jesus’ disciples measured up to this standard.  I know more than a few, and even some who wear those funny black and white “dog collars” around their necks, that would fail the “Christian” litmus test if Christian genuinely meant nice and kind.  In fact, sometimes the more religious a person is the less Christian he or she seems to be.  As one old priest from Poland who is a friend of mine confided to me, his frequent prayer is “From the daily communicant, libera nos, Domine!”    
      A second sense in which one can use the word “Christian”—and this one with some legitimacy—is a person who embraces the ethical teachings of Jesus as outlined in the Gospels.  One may accept Jesus as a great moral teacher without espousing his Divinity or even the uniqueness of the Revelation he imparts to humankind in his teachings as the New Testament records them.  By this standard, Thomas Jefferson and many of our Founding Fathers (and I suppose Mothers) would qualify as Christian as would Quakers, most Unitarians, and many good souls who have no formal religious affiliation with a particular denomination that claims to be “Christian.”  Few of our the founders of our nation were Christians in the stricter use of the term.  Charles Carroll, the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, was one of the few leaders of the new nation who actually was a practicing Christian. 
     A third sense of the word “Christian” would be a person who does have formal membership in a religious group that claims for itself to be a “Christian” Church or denomination.  Now claiming to be Christian doesn’t make a person or collective group of people Christian anymore than claiming that bag you’re selling on a street corner for 25 dollars is a genuine Versace makes that knockoff a genuine Versace.  But there is a social convention by which we generally don’t call each other out in public about such claims.  Nevertheless, while we may be polite and choose not to challenge the authentic Christian beliefs of one another, that doesn’t mean that we accept the authenticity of Christian faith in each other.   A particular point is the issue of valid baptism.  Some groups that claim to be Christian, groups such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, baptize “in the name of Jesus” as opposed to baptizing “in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”  The Catholic Church insists that the Trinitarian formula is necessary for valid baptism according to Matthew 28:19.  (There are scripture passages which would seem to validate baptism in the “Name of the Lord Jesus” (Acts 2:38; 10:48;19:5, but the Catholic Church and most other Christian denominations reject this formula as insufficient based on historical usage and the centrality of the Doctrine of the Trinity to Christian Orthodoxy.)   While we might say that a particular Jehovah’s Witness is “such a fine Christian” in the sense that he or she is a very nice person, or we might even see how their reading the Gospels has endowed them with a set of good Christian values, we would not consider Jehovah Witnesses to be Christian in the sense of belonging to a community of baptized disciples. 
     A fourth sense of the word “Christian,” very close to the last mentioned definition but still different from it, is public affiliation to one of the Churches or religious communities that stands by Christian Faith and Doctrine  as taught by the Apostles and historically defined by the first seven Councils of an undivided Christian Church.  This faith is generally seen as that proclaimed in the three historic creeds: the Apostle’s Creed, the Creed of the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople I, and the Athanasian Creed or Quicumque Vult.  A Christian in this sense accepts the doctrine that there is one God in three Divine Persons, each Person possessing the fullness of the Divine Nature yet being not three Divine Beings but only One.  Such a person, to be a Christian also must accept that Jesus Christ is truly God as is the Father (and the Holy Spirit) and is truly human as are we.  In the one Person of Jesus Christ there are two natures, one Divine and one Human, the natures are joined but not mixed and while each nature is and remains distinct, what can be attributed to each nature can also be said of the other.  All this sounds very complicated but that is because we always try to explain that which transcends our experience and thus is inexplicable.  Sometimes I think we should simply let Mystery be Mystery and not try to unpack Grace.  
      How do Mormons fit into this scheme?  Mormons use the Trinitarian formula for baptism (and until I had done research for this posting, I had thought they baptized in the Name of the Lord Jesus), but most “mainline” Christian theologians and denominations—Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Methodist—have looked at Mormon theology and decided that while Mormons talk about the Trinity they have a very different understanding of the Divine Nature, that is of “God,” than historic Christianity.  In other words, while they use the same words (God, Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) they mean something quite different by those words.  That would mean not only that their faith is substantially different from Christian faith but that their baptism, while using the same words and outward signs (immersion in water), means something very different than as understood by historic Christianity.  For this reason the Catholic Church as well as most other Christian denominations require that Mormons be baptized when joining the Church.  A Presbyterian or a Lutheran, for example, would be “received” into the Catholic Church without repeating baptism.  Baptism in the Catholic theology is an unrepeatable act.  If validly baptized once, you are never baptized again.  But a Mormon becoming a Catholic would have to be baptized as his Mormon “baptism” would be regarded as invalid as the “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” in which he or she had been baptized as a Mormon is not the “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” of our historic Christian faith which is shared by the Orthodox Churches of the East and the majority of Anglican and Protestant Churches (or ecclesial communities) of the West.   Also, because the Mormon understanding of the Divine Nature is, or at least appears to us to be, so radically different than that espoused by historic orthodox Christianity, their understanding of Jesus Christ—in whom the Divine and Human natures are united (though not mixed)—is radically different from that proclaimed historically by the Christian faith.  Thus Catholics would not recognize Mormons doctrinally as Christians. 
      So it all seems to boil down to Are Mormons Christians?  Yes, in the sense that as many (indeed most) Mormons are really fine people many (indeed most) Mormons  are Christians in that broad colloquial sense.  Yes, also, in the sense that most Mormons lead lives shaped by the moral teachings of Jesus.  In this they are as Christian as Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin or most of our Founding Fathers who thought Jesus was this really wise and ethical teacher.  Actually even more so for while they understand the Divinity of Christ, and indeed divinity, differently than historic Christianity, Mormons do believe that in their sense of being Divine, Jesus fit the bill.  They do not think of him merely as some enlightened human teacher.  But No, from the Catholic understanding of Christian Faith and Sacraments, Mormons are not Christians in the sense of professing authentic Christian doctrine and no they are not Christian in the sense of being in the community of the baptized.  Frankly, when it comes to being President of the United States, I won’t hold anyone to a test of religious beliefs, but the only sense in which I would prefer a Christian over a non-Christian is that second sense—a man or woman whose life and values are shaped by the teachings of Jesus in the Gospel.  When it comes to Christians in public life, I am much more interested in orthopraxis than orthodoxis.   And in that sense, Mitt is the only fellow (or fellowette) currently  in the Republican field that I would vote for.   

Roots of the Reformation XX: The Ottonian Reformation I

The Empire of Otto I
included modern Germany, Switzerland,
the Netherlands, Belgiumjparts of Austria,
France, and Italy as far south as Naples 

Well, I ended up taking a bit of a vacation from the blog—which I shouldn’t do as every time I skip just two days, the readership starts falling and it takes me a week to rebuild it.  So sorry folks for the interruption.  I do have a life—and even a day job—and this blog takes a considerable amount of time.  But I do enjoy it and what is more it is worth it if it encourages people to think, not a about the past, but about our Catholic Church today and some of the issues confronting it.

We had been talking about the problem of Reform of the Church—and who can reform it when the need for reform begins right at the top.  This has happened in the past with corrupt popes and papal administrations that forgot the gospel and became over invested in their own ambition for power, wealth, and pomp.  We saw how in his day Charlemagne had stepped in and set things right with Leo III (blog entry June 4, 2011).  Well after Leo things only got worse—and we saw what happened with Marozia, Theodora and the pornacracy (entries June 9, June 6, and January 15).   You may remember the Cadaver synod (entry, January 24, 2011).  These are all great stories.  Amazingly, as corrupt as the Borgias were—and as Showtime showed them, they were pretty corrupt—the tenth century papacies were even more wicked.  Who would set the Church back in order?

Charlemagne’s empire with its Renaissance and Reformation did not last.  The Emperor was succeeded by his son, Louis, who in turn was succeeded by his son Lothair.  But Lothair’s claims of Imperial supremacy were disputed by his half-brothers Louis the German and Charles the Bald  The two brothers were too strong for Lothair and after much warfare among the three, Lothair was left with the imperial title but with much of the realm taken by his brothers. Lothair himself, when dying, left the imperial title to his son Louis, but divided his remaining lands among Louis and his two brothers—Lothair II and Charles of Provence.  This was not an easy time for Europe—the Magyars were sweeping in from the east, the Vikings were ravaging the Atlantic and channel coasts and the Saracens were ravaging the Italian possessions of the Empire. There was a need for strong leadership to meet the challenges and there were plenty of strong leaders—but they kept fighting one another rather than the external enemies.   On his deathbed, Louis named his cousin Carloman, the son of his uncle Louis the German, to succeed him, but his other uncle, Charles the Bald—in connivance with Pope John VIII—seized the throne.  John, by the way, is a curious personage himself and was quite effeminate.  Patrick Madrid, an amateur historian (and the operative word here is amateur), suggests his effeminacy may have given rise to the Pope Joan legends.  That is a very complex topic and we will have fun someday soon looking at those stories.  However “light in his buskins” he may have been, John was a good pope; indeed a great pope.  Of course the competition at the time was not much.  John had a problem and that was the Saracen (Muslim) pirates who were raiding papal Italy and so the pope turned to the Carolingians for help just as Leo III had turned to Charlemagne and Pope Zachary had turned to Pepin in their respective political woes in the previous century.  They let him down—they were too divided among themselves for any sort of effective response—and, in the end, the popes had to pay tribute to the Saracens.

Speaking of the Carolingians,  Charles the Bald was succeeded in the Imperial title by his nephew, Charles the Fat.   Meanwhile in each of these successions various grandchildren and great grandchildren of Charlemagne kept dividing lands and squabbling with one another, each trying to expand his own power.  Most were not interested in the imperial title because it had become nothing more than that—a title.  Power was local and the central administration of Charlemagne had completely broken down.  In fact, with the death of Berengar of Friuli in 924 the throne and title themselves were empty and remained so for thirty-eight years.  All this at a time when Europe needed strong leadership—and when the Church needed a protector not only against Vikings and Saracens, but against some of the most unworthy men every to sit on the throne of Peter.   This was a time when popes obtained their office by cash, by murder and by adultery.  

In 962 the great-great-great-great-grandson of Charlemagne, through a predominately feminine line, took the throne and revived the empire.   His name was Otto.  He had become King of East Francia in 936, that part of Charlemagne’s empire that went to Louis the German and is what we call today Germany (West Francia, or West Frankreich being France, also known at this period as Neustria).  Otto arranged for his coronation at Charlemagne’s capital of Aachen and in Charlemagne’s cathedral where Charlemagne’s bones lie.  Now, just in case you’re missing this—he is trying from the beginning to establish a claim to Charlemagne’s title and realm. His intention is to refound Charlemagne’s “Roman Empire.”

In the early 960’s, the papal possessions in Italy—the Papal States—were overrun and conquered by Berengar II, the grandson of Berengar of Friuli who had been the last emperor, dying in 924.  Berengar II was a thug.  The Pope—John XII—was worse.  Nevertheless, when John asked the help of Otto in regaining his temporal possessions, Otto came down into Italy, defeated Berengar, restored the Pope to power.  The Pope, for his part, then crowned Otto as Emperor, restoring the lapsed imperium.  Pope and Emperor then established the Diploma Ottonianum, a treaty in which Otto and his successors would “protect” the papacy. 

This brings us back to the thorny issue of papal versus imperial power.  Charlemagne saw himself having supreme authority over the Church in the model that the Byzantine Emperors had exercised from the time of Justinian, and in fact from Constantine’s control over the Church.  Certainly Constantine met nothing but gratitude from Popes Miltiades and Sylvester.   Justinian, for his part, kept papal authority dependent on the Imperial exarch in Italy.  This was and would be a problem for Eastern (later specifically Orthodox) Christianity where the Emperors—first the Greek Emperor at Constantinople and later the Russian Emperors at Moscow and Saint Petersburg—firmly kept the Church under the imperial thumb and the Church thanked them for that.  So deeply ingrained was the Caesropapism in Orthodoxy that centuries later, even under the worst years of Communist oppression and persecution, the Russian Church was totally compliant with the Soviet government.  But, to be fair, that was its strategy for survival and in so far as it was a survival strategy, it worked. 

The Western Emperors saw their authority in the same way and for several centuries most popes agreed.  We saw (see blog entry of May 12, 2011) that Charlemagne altered the Creed of Nicea and, in direct contradiction to Leo III, insisted that this revised Creed be used in the liturgy)   In 824, Louis the Pious, his son and co-emperor, Lothair, and Pope Eugene II promulgated the Constitutio Romana, a protocol by which the Popes recognized, among other things, that the authority of the Emperor was supreme.  The Popes, for their part, were in a bind.  They needed the military protection from a series of foes—Lombards, Magyars, Saracens, and a host of Italian warrior-counts—to protect Rome and the papal territories.  Secondly they, like everyone else in Europe, were used to thinking of the Emperor as being supreme, indeed as being the Vicar of Christ which was a title the emperors (not the popes) had appropriated to themselves.  Finally, the popes had very little real power.  Bishops were elected locally, admittedly often under some royal or noble pressure.  Local Bishops, not popes, made decisions regarding liturgy and cult as well as Church discipline.  Papal authority was exercised more by encouragement and exhortation than by decree.  There was not much point into getting into “turf warfare” with the Emperor.  That would change, but for the time being, the popes were willing to let the issue slide.  And it was just as well—the Church needed the emperors to clean up a papacy that had become hopelessly corrupt.  I did a blog entry on what historians call The Pornacracy (cf. January 15 2011) which means the Rule (of the Church) by whores and refers to a period.  While you’re looking at that check out the January 24 2011 entry which is about the Cadaver Synod.  This might give you a picture of just how mad things were in the Church in the tenth century.     I think tomorrow we will talk about John XII—the pope who asks Otto for help.  It will show you why we need some outside authority to clean up the mess in Rome.  Just remember the old Italian axiom—il pesce puzza dalla testa—the fish rots from the head: it was coined about the papacy. 

Roots of the Reformation XI: Crown Control of the Church

The Holy Spirit Window of the Chapel of the Carmelite Nuns
in Christoval Texas--modeled on the window over Bernini's
Altar of the Chair inSaint Peter's Basilica.

We had  been talking about clericalism and the danger it presents to the Church and I want to pick up on that theme both in terms of the anti-clericalism of sixteenth century and rising anti-clericalism in the Church today.  But before we go further down that road, I do want to finish up on Charlemagne and his Reformation in the ninth century. 

I recently wrote that Charlemagne and Pope Leo III (and his successors) had a clear understanding of the respective roles of the pope and of the emperor.  The emperor was to protect the Church and manage its external affairs; the pope was to define the doctrines which guaranteed the unity of the faith and to pray for the Emperor and his army, whose task it was to defend the Church.  Sometimes, however, the Emperor usurped even this somewhat limited role of the pope.  An important case in point was the dispute over the “Filioque”—the line in the Nicene Creed that declares that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father “and the Son.”  

In the original Nicene formulation, the Fathers of the Council of Nicea (325) defined that the Holy Spirit proceeds “from the Father.”  Now, I am not going to get into the doctrinal issue here, but suffice it to say that the decrees of a Council, and especially the first seven Councils, need to be held unchanged unless changed by the Universal Church, i.e. the Churches of the East and of the West.  Individual bishops or even synods cannot usurp the magisterium of the Universal Church which the teaching of a Council represents.  Nevertheless a synod of bishops in Spain, the Third Council of Toledo (589) added the phrase filioque to the Nicene formula, proclaiming that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.  They had no authority to do so, of course, yet it became a popular variation in the Creed in both what is today Spain and France.  In 809 Charlemagne had it added to the Liturgy in the chapel royal in Aachen, the Imperial Capital.

Pope Leo III, in Rome, forbad the addition and had the original formula of the Creed engraved on silver plates with the admonition that it was never to be changed.    Two centuries later, however, the filioque was added at Rome.  Almost immediately it became and still remains today one of the major points of contention today between the Orthodox Churches of the East and the Catholic Church.  The Eastern Catholic Churches in communion with Rome no longer use it in the Creed and in the Anglican Communion and the Lutheran Churches it has most usually been abandoned these past twenty-five years or so.  There is some pressure on the Catholic Church to drop the filioque from the Creed, not as a denial of the doctrine but as a sign of the Catholic Church’s repentance for having unilaterally altered an infallible formula from an Ecumenical Council.   Charlemagne’s interference in this matter brings up a crucial issue and that is the role of the Emperor vis a vis the authority of the Patriarch.  In the East, both in Constantinople and later in Moscow, the Emperors had firm control over the Church, subjecting the authority of the Patriarch to that of the Crown.  In Western Europe there would be a long battle for supremacy between Pope and Emperor—culminating in the Guelf and Ghibelline struggles of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries between the Popes and the Hohenstaufen Emperors.  The Popes would eventually assert their authority, at least in matters spiritual, over the Imperial Crown, but that settlement would not hold in England and Scandinavia where the respective crowns would eventually demand authority over the Church in their realms leading to the English, Danish, and Swedish Reformations.  And all that will be dealt with in the future. 

Origins of Radical Catholicism XXIII: Americanism, fact or fiction?

Was there in fact such a thing as Americanism—a “heresy” within the Church that subverted key Catholic doctrines—or, was “Americanism” something that existed only in the mind of those Roman officials who had read Felix Klein’s book, La Vie du Pére Hecker, and found themselves panicked and angered by the values Klein promoted but attributed to Hecker and other American religious thinkers?

Liberals—the intellectual or political descendents of Ireland, Gibbons, O’Connell, Keane and others—tend to deny the charge and claim that they stand in a tradition going back to Bishop John Carroll and his vision for the Catholic Church in the new American Republic.  They claim that while the American and Americanist worldview differed from that of European churchmen, they were orthodox in matters of doctrine and faithful in matters of ecclesiastical discipline.  Conservatives on the other hand—not only the heirs of Corrigan and the Germans, but the Roman Church of the Latter-Day Saints who in these post-Vatican II day rally around such Apostles and Prophets as Raymond Arroyo, “Father Z.”, Joseph Fessio, the Hitchcocks, et al see their foes as a modern day reincarnation of the old American liberal troublemakers and pray that Timothy Dolan won’t go the way of Joseph Bernadin and Roger Mahoney and channel the shades of Cardinal Gibbons or John Ireland.  So who is right?  Were Gibbons and crowd within our without the pale of orthodoxy?    

In its historical context, there certainly was such a thing as “Americanism” though I hesitate to call it a heresy.  It certainly was perceived as a heresy—and I believe that given its place in time it was correctly perceived as one.  There was an ecumenical espirit that contradicted Catholic doctrine as it was held in the 19^th century, although it would look pretty tame compared to official Church positions in this age of the Assisi Encounters and the post-conciliar popes welcoming religious leaders of every stripe at the Vatican.  The idea of the separation of Church and State—and indeed republicanism itself—was contrary to Catholic political theology of the late nineteenth century.  A third valid point (valid for the time and I think still valid today) is that America (whether Catholic or Protestant) then—and now—and always—has overvalued the active virtues and minimalized the interior or contemplative life.  I think too we did and still do place too much emphasis on individual inspiration rather than submission to the common faith and we permit individual inspiration to outweigh, not traditions, but Tradition.   On the other hand, I don’t think it bad—to the contrary I think it healthy—that America has some views that balance the Roman mentality.  I think the Catholic, i.e. universal, Church needs to draw its insights from the many sources of grace where the Spirit flows and not just from Rome’s tired old reservoir.  I think that perhaps what Rome fears from the American Church is that it does seem in these last few decades that a lot of people in Rome itself and around the Church are gradually succumbing to American ideas and values.  It wasn’t just that Paul VI got rid of the monarchical trappings of cardinal’s costumes with their long trains of scarlet silk (though some are trying to bring them back, most notably the American peacock, Raymond Burke) and it has been ages since some old bag with more money than God has been made a Papal Duchess, but that the Vatican has become a business with pricey gift-shops in the museums and a bank that hums with activity as nuns and abbots line up with librarians and bakers to make their deposits and withdrawals.  (If only someone would teach them about bank-cheques all our lives could be easier.)   Not everything American is good, but Americans are efficient and the Italians are not; I think the Church could stand some efficiency in administration.  The downside is that today’s Vatican is as secular as the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the government of Belgium. Romans, Americans, the French, the Chinese, the Kenyans—we live in a modern world and the powers that be in the Church need to make peace with that fact.  I am not saying that modernization is good or it’s bad, only pointing out that there is a significant paradigm shift and the Church must accommodate itself to it. 

What the late nineteenth-century Americanists wanted the Church to do was—and it was one of the things condemned by Pius IX in his Syllabus of Errors—was to make peace with the world in which it exists and not constantly bemoan the good old days when the world was run to suit the Church—and Churchmen.  That day is over and it won’t be coming back.  The Church needs to look for new models—paradigms of existence—that fit the reality of time and place.  Despite its somewhat whitewashed official histories, the Church was not always a Monarchy of Divine Right.  There even was a time, perhaps several times, when the Church understood it had come to serve the needs of sick, the poor, the disenfranchised—rather than to be served by rich and poor alike.   Maybe that time will come again.  I don’t think Gibbons necessarily saw the Church as a servant to the world, and Ireland, despite his liberal ideas, was as autocratic as any French King—but the Americanists did challenge the model of Church where all power came allegedly from God and then from those who were the Lord’s anointed down.  They pointed out that in addition to the Institution, the Church consisted of the poor and suffering who need the Church’s protection and help.  They refocused the vision—not the narcissistic vision of a Church that gazed in the mirror at its own bedazzling image—but the vision which Jesus outlined when he said he came to bring good news to the poor and to announce a year of God’s favour to all.  The Americans would not be the ones to get his message across to the contemporary world.  At Vatican II it would be the Europeans themselves who declaimed the fascination of the Church with clericalism, juridicism, and triumphalism.  But the Americans played a role in the late nineteenth century that would bear great fruit in the middle of the twentieth.    
The image today is the interior of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC